Is It Easy to Be a Photographer's Model?

Read the text and say if you have illusions towards this profession.
She is a photographer's model, high fashion. Her face is familiar one in magazine ads and on television commercials. She has been engaged in this work for eight years. She earns the city's top rate: $ 50 an hour.
At first you work very hard to try to discover different looks and hairdos. After a while you know them all. Someone once asked me, "Why do high-fashion models pose with their mouths open? They look like they're catching flies." This look has been accepted for a long time. They want everything to be sexy, subtle or overt. It's automatic.
They want you natural but posed. How can you feel natural with three pounds of make-up, in some ridiculous costume, standing there and looking pretty?
Someone will call you at seven in the morning and say be ready at eight thirty. Can you be there in 40 minutes? You're trying to get your wardrobe together and be there in time. It's terrible. Somehow you manage to make it on time. I'm very seldom late, I'm amazed at myself.
You go out of your house with your closetful on your arm. Different colors and shoes to match and purses and wigs. So I've developed these strong muscles with one shoulder lower than the other from carrying all the wardrobe about.
In the middle of the winter you're fighting all the people to get a taxi. You're supposed to look fresh and your hair is supposed to be sparkling. By the time you get there, you're perspiring like crazy, and it's difficult to feel fresh under all those hot lights when you've had such a struggle to get there.
Most people have strange feeling about standing before a camera. You have to learn to move and make different designs with your body.
You feel like you're a clothes hanger. One day someone will say you're great. In the next studio they will say you're terrible. It changes from minute to minute: acceptance, rejection.
My feelings are ambivalent. I like my life because it does give me freedom.
I usually don't tell people that I am a model. I say I'm an actuary or something.
I don't like to look at my pictures. I don't like to ride by and see some advertisement and tell everyone that's me.
Most models, after one or two years, can't be very interested in it. But they get involved with money, so it's difficult for them to quit. And there's always the possibility of the commercial that's going to make you twenty thousand dollars at one crack. You can work very hard all year on photos and not make as much as you can on two television commercials.
Male models are even worse. They're usually ex-beach boys or ex-policemen or ex-waiters.
They think they're going to get rich fast. Money and sex are big things in their life. They talk about these two things constantly. Money more than sex, but sex a lot. Dirty jokes and the fast buck. You see this handsome frame and you find it empty.